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Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

The Future of Social is Here: a Show and Tell (part 4: Lemmy, PieFed & Mbin)
Elena Rossini, 2024/08/22

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This article explores Fediverse content aggregators as alternatives to Reddit, and specifically, Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin and Friendica. While interoperability was a bit of a mixed bag for the first three, it was basically nonexistent for Friendica. Quite a detailed article, so if these services are new to you there is quite a bit here to learn. This is part 4 of a series; the first three cover topics already well explored in these pages.

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How Scientific Is Cognitive Load Theory Research Compared to the Rest of Educational Psychology?
Amedee Marchand Martella, Alyssa P. Lawson, Daniel H. Robinson, Education Sciences, 2024/08/22

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It's hard to know what to make of this article (8 page PDF). Two major points are made. The first is that cognitive load theory is diverging from the rest of educational psychology (edpsych) in that while edpsych "employed mostly observational methods, all but two of the CLT articles employed experimental or intervention designs." The second is that the "failure of experiments to replicate helped cognitive load theory to expand with the identification of boundary conditions" prompting proponent John Sweller to remark, "Cognitive load theory's continual adaptation to new data is one of its primary virtues." The authors assert "Randomized control trials have long been considered the gold standard and are the ideal design for establishing causality and making recommendations for practice" but with the entire field moving in a different direction one wonders whether this continues to be true. Proving cause and effect in complex environments is tendentious at best, and when theories simply adapt to disconfirming data, one wonders whether they are provable at all.

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Celebrating An Important Step Forward For Open Source AI | The Mozilla Blog
Ayah Bdeir, Imo Udom, Nik Marda, dist://ed, 2024/08/22

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As Mozilla reports, " The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has recently released a new draft definition of open source AI, marking a critical juncture in the evolution of the internet." The new definition is about what we would expect, with one important caveat: access to the data. Here's what it says: the preferred form is "sufficiently detailed information about the data used to train the system, so that a skilled person can recreate a substantially equivalent system using the same or similar data." This is not the same as open data. It's hard for me to imagine something being open AI without the data being used to train it also being open. But this definition leaves a city-wide loophole for the use of proprietary data.

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The Post-AI Instructional Designer
Philippa Hardman, Dr Phil's Newsletter, Powered by DOMS AI, 2024/08/22

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Philippa Hardman's articles post an increasing conundrum for me, because they are very obviously at a minimum AI assisted, and yet despite that (or perhaps because of that) they're pretty good. This week's: "what should a partnership of human instructional designer and AI look like in practice, and what does this mean for our key skills, roles and responsibilities?" It's a good analysis of the topic - yet I can imagine what the questions posed to the AI were. And I have to ask - should I be searching for and linking to articles that people could create for themselves using their own AI accounts? The concept of 'discovery' has changed completely.

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Defining "Student Safe AI" Before Moral Panic Sets In
Alex Sarlin, Edtech Insiders, 2024/08/22

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Good and fairly detailed article with a clickbaity headline looking at the question of how to ensure AI is appropriate for student use. The article eventually sets out a proposal: "What if we were to build a new benchmark assessment to test core elements of a student-safe AI experience? If we were to generate a set of scenarios (student prompts), inferences (expert answers), and teacher-evaluated data sets around important criteria like 'bullying' what would this look like?"

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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